'We know what the Government thinks about people who go to food banks,” thundered Ed Miliband at Prime Minister’s Questions this week, “because the Children’s Secretary said that people who go to food banks only have themselves to blame.”

It was the only thunderous moment in a drizzly sort of session for Mr Miliband, and his rather sullen backbenchers momentarily woke up at that point to roar with outrage at the Government benches. A Tory minister claiming that those asking for emergency help “only have themselves to blame” is indeed toxic.

The only snag is that Michael Gove didn’t actually say it. He told a Labour MP at Education Questions on Monday that the pressures families face “are often the result of decisions that they have taken which mean they are not best able to manage their finances. We need to ensure that support is not just financial, and that the right decisions are made.”

The Education Secretary was being rather too flippant, though, and, for a fan of precision, his grasp of the statistics on food bank use wouldn’t earn him good marks in a test. The main reason for emergency food help is not financial mismanagement, but benefit problems, with 34 per cent of food bank clients citing benefit delay, and 19 per cent asking for help because of changes to their benefits – and that last figure has been rising since a number of welfare cuts came into effect in April.

After that, 16 per cent of referrals are due to a family struggling to manage on a low income, and 10 per cent are down to debt, so perhaps financial education would have a bigger long-term effect than extra cash in some cases. But even if you’re skilled at managing pots of money, there is not much you can do if there just isn’t enough money in those pots to feed your family.

Perhaps what this rage that swirls around whenever someone says something about food and finance shows is that there’s not much point in talking about the subject unless you fancy donning a tin hat for a couple of days.

In April, the Tory food minister Richard Benyon was pilloried by Labour for suggesting that the Government could help families waste less food. Last month, Jamie Oliver found himself at the end of the same Left-wing hairdryer for making slightly less considered comments about families who didn’t know how to cook but who owned big televisions. And each time someone tries to think aloud about how it is that the number of families receiving food parcels is mushrooming while we throw away about a third of all food, they are berated by people (usually on the Left) who have no better an understanding of this country’s food problem.

It’s a shame Labour feels the need to be so shouty – many of its own MPs are members of the all-party parliamentary group on financial education, so they can clearly see there’s a problem. Chaired by the Conservative Justin Tomlinson, it is the most popular of these all-party groups, with 245 backbench members. It has campaigned to get personal finance into the new national curriculum – and succeeded: the final version was published yesterday.

Meanwhile, thoughtful Tory MP Laura Sandys has been running a commission on how best to support people struggling with the rising cost of food. Considering policies that can make consumers as resilient as possible, so they have the best chance of never needing a food bank, is a far more productive use of an MP’s time than misquoting a minister. Perhaps it is easier to manufacture outrage, though, than think complex issues through.

If Labour wants to poison the debate about food and money, then it will only have itself to blame if, when it eventually returns to office, it finds the problems it pilloried ministers for trying to address are still very much around.